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One Who Knows Not the World-Order, Knows Not One’s Own Place therein!
There were the films of symphony performances, the full-scale operas, the unending virtuous concerts! I thought I would go mad with the beauty of it—witnessing in living color and mesmerizing detail the London Philharmonic play Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, or the great Itzhak Perlman racing through the Brahms Concerto with an orchestra surrounding me. One of the situations in which children of all social levels come together and compete for status in terms of the same set of middle-class criteria and in which working-class children are most likely to be found wanting is in the schooled. American educators ae enamored of the idea of “democracy” signifies the fullest realization of the individual’s potentialities, the development of skills to an optimal level, the development of character and the abilities which can be bound by others, preparation for effective participation in the adult vocational World. Despite reservations such as with due regard to individual differences, this conception of democratic education implies that a major function of the schools is to promote, encourage, motivate, stimulate, in brief, reward middle-class ambition and conformity to middle-class expectations. However sincerely one may desire to avoid odious comparisons and to avoid, thereby, injury to the self-esteem of those who do not conform to one’s expectations, it is extremely difficult to reward, however subtly, successful conformity without at the same time, by implication, condemning and punishing the non-conformist. #RandolphHarris 1 of 18
That same teacher who prides oneself on one’s recognition and encouragement of deserving work-class children dramatizes, by that very show of pride, the superior merit of the college-boy or college-girls working-class child to one’s less gifted or [street] corner-boy and corner-girl working-classmates. There are three goof reasons why status in the school, insofar as it depends upon recognition by the teacher, should be measured by middle-class standards. First, the teacher is hired to foster the development of middle-class personalities. The middle-class board of education, the middle-class parents whom they represent and, it is to be presumed, many of the working-class parents as well expect the teacher to define one’s job as the indoctrination of middle-class aspirations, character, skills and manners. Second, the teacher oneself is almost certain to be a middle-class person, who personally values ambition and achievement and spontaneously recognizes and rewards these virtues in others. The third relates to the school itself as a social system with certain structural imperatives of its own. The teacher’s textbooks in education and one’s own supervisors may stress individualization and consideration for the needs, limitations and special problems of each student. Nonetheless, the teacher actually handles 20, 30, or 40 students at a time. #RandolphHarris 2 of 18
Regardless of what one conceives one’s proper function to be, the teacher necessarily looks with favor on the quiet, cooperative, well-behaved pupils who make one’s job easier and with disapproval and vexation on the lusty, irrepressible boisterous youngsters who are destructive of order, routine and predictability in the classroom. Furthermore, the teacher is like to be upwardly mobile or at least anxious about the security of one’s tenure in one’s present job. One is motivated, therefore, to conform to the criteria in terms of which one’s superiors evaluate one. Those superiors may themselves be progressive and in teacher meetings preach democracy in the classroom and individualization and indeed genuinely believe in those goals. However, the degree to which a teacher tries to achieve these goals or succeeds in doing so is not highly visible and readily determined. On the other hand, grades, performance and standardized examinations, the cleanliness and orderliness of the classroom and the frequency with which the children are sent to the front office are among the most easily determined and objective bases for the evaluation of teacher performance. A good rating, then, by one’s supervisors is possible only if the teacher sacrifices to some degree the very individualization and tolerance which those same supervisors may urge upon one. #RandolphHarris 3 of 18
Research on the kinds of behavior which teachers regard as the most problematical among their pupils gives results consistent with our expectations. The most serious problems, from the standpoint of the teacher, are those children who are restless and unruly, who fidget and squirm, who annoy and distract, who create discipline problems. The good children are the studious, the obedient, the docile. It is precisely the working-class children who are most likely to be problems because of their relative lack of training in order and discipline, their lack of interest in intellectual achievement and their lack of reinforcement by the home in conformity to the requirements of the school. Both in terms of conduct and in terms of academic achievement, the failures in the classroom are drawn disproportionately from the lower social class levels. The child has little or no choice in selecting the group within which one shall compete for status and one is evaluated against the total range of the ability distribution. It is here that, day after day, most of the children in the lower fourth of the distribution have their sense of worth destroyed, develop feelings of insecurity, become frustrated and lose confidence in their ability to learn that which they are capable of learning. #RandolphHarris 4 of 18
In dialogue, each experiences the other as a person, as the origin and source of one’s intentional acts. Each participant aims to show one’s being to the other as it is for the individual. Transparency, not mystification, is one of the goals. It matters little whether the dialogue is nonverbal or verbal; whether it occurs between a philosopher and one’s pupil, a therapist and one’s patient, a parent and child, or two friends. The aim is to show oneself in willful honesty before the other and to respond to the other with an expression of one’s experience as the other has affected it. Dialogue is like mutual unveiling, where each seeks to be the experienced and confirmed by the other as the one he or she is for oneself. Such dialogue is most likely to occur when the two people believe each is trustworthy and of goodwill. The threat that motivates people to conceal their intentions and experience in manipulative encounters is absent in dialogue. The aims that makes the action of each intelligible to other will be fully revealed. Now, I would like to examine the relationship between an experimenter and one’s subject in the light of those analyses of the two kinds of encounter. The usual encounter between a psychological researcher and one’s subject has more in common with the example of the young being on the make than it has with dialogue. The experimenter wants something from the subject, but one wants to keep the individual partly mystified as to what it is. #RandolphHarris 5 of 18
Moreover, one does not want to frighten the subject away; so the psychological researcher often cloaks one’s intentions with camouflage. If one tips one’s hand, one may influence the subject and bias one’s findings. One tells the subject as little as one can when the latter appears in the laboratory. Actually, in some ways a research psychologist tries to impersonate a machine by depersonalizing oneself. One tries to be invisible or to be constant. One seldom tries to fin out from one’s subject just how that person experiences one, the researcher, either perceptually or in one’s fantasy. When an individual appears before others one’s actions will influence the definition of the situation which they come to have. Sometimes the individual will act in a thoroughly calculating manner, expressing oneself in a given way solely in order to give the kind of impression to others that is likely to evoke from them a specific response one is concerned to obtained. Sometimes the individual will be calculating in one’s activity but be relatively unaware that this is the case. Sometimes one will intentionally and consciously express oneself in a particular way, but chiefly because the tradition of one’s group or social status require this kind of expression and not because of any particular response (other than vague acceptance or approval) that is likely to be evoked from those impressed by the expression. #RandolphHarris 6 of 18
Sometimes the traditions of an individual’s role will lead one to give a well-designed impression of a particular kind and yet one may be neither consciously nor unconsciously disposed to create such an impression. The others, in their turn. May be suitably impressed by the individual’s efforts to convey something, or may misunderstand the situation and come to conclusions that are warranted neither by the individual’s intent nor by the facts. In any case, in particular impressions, we may take a functional or pragmatic view and say that the individual has effectively projected a given definition of the situation and effectively fostered the understanding that given state of affairs obtains. There is one aspect of the others’ response that bear special comment here. Knowing that the individual is like to present oneself in a light that is favorable to one, the others may divide what they witness into two parts; a part that is relatively easy for the individual to manipulate at will, being chiefly one’s verbal assertions, and a part in regard to which one seems to have little concern or control, being chiefly derived from the expressions one gives off. The others may then use what are considered to be the ungovernable aspects of one’s expressive behavior as a check upon the validity of what is conveyed by the governable aspects. #RandolphHarris 7 of 18
In this fundamental asymmetry is demonstrated in the communication process, the individual presumably being aware of only one stream of the individual’s communication, the witnesses of this stream and one other. For example, in Shetland Isle one crofter’s wife, in serving native dishes to a visitor from the mainland of Britain, would listen with a polite smile to his polite claims of liking what he was eating; at the same time she would take note of the rapidity with which the visitors lifted one’s fork or spoon to one’s mouth, the eagerness with which one passed food into one’s mouth, and the gusto expressed in chewing the food, using these signs as a check on the stated feelings of the eater. The same woman, in order to discover what one acquaintance (A) actually thought of another acquaintance (B), would wait until B was in the presence of A but engaged in conversation with C. No being in conversation with B, and not being directly observed by him, A would sometimes relax usual constraints and tactful deceptions, and freely express what one was actually feeling about B. This Shetlander, in short, would observe the unobserved observer. Those who discuss labor often comment that nowadays most jobs call for a capacity to deal with people rather than with things, for more interpersonal skills and fewer mechanical skills. #RandolphHarris 8 of 18
The fact that individuals now talk to other individuals, rather than interact with a machine, is the fundamental fact about work in the post-industrial society. There is a continual subdivision of work in many branches of the economy. Complex tasks in which a craftsman used to take pride are divided into simpler, more repetitive segments, each more boring and less well paid than the original job. Work is deskilled and the worker belittled. However, celebrants and critics alike have not inspected at close hand or with a social-psychological eye what it is that people jobs actually require of workers. They have not inquired into the actual nature of this labor. Some do not know exactly what, in the case of emotional labor, becomes deskilled. A second discourse, closer to the person and more remote from the overall organization of work, concerns the display of feelings. There are many minor traffic rules of face-to-face interaction as they emerge at a card game, in an elevator, on the street, or at the dining table of an insane asylum. We cannot dismiss the small as trivial by show how small rules, transgression, and punishments add up to form the longer strips of experience we call work. At the same time, it is hard to explain, for example, why companies train flight attendants in smiling, or how emotion tone is supervised, or what profit is ultimately tied to emotional labor. #RandolphHarris 9 of 18
It is hard, in other words, to draw on this discourse alone and see how display work fits into the larger scheme of things. The third discourse takes pace in a quiet side street of American social science; it deals with the timeless issues of what an emotion is and how we can manage it. To uncover the heart of emotional labor, to understand what it takes to do it and what it does to people, it is important to realize that certain events in economic history cannot be fully understood unless we pay attention to the filigreed patterns of feeling and their management because the details of these patterns are an important part of what may men and women do for a living. Because such different traditions are joined here, my inquiry will have a different relevance for those who do the work it describes—the flight attendants. However, most of us have jobs that require some handling of other people’s feelings and our own, and in this sense we are all partly flight attendants. One who has realized truth according to the Secret Doctrine may continue to follow the same vocation which one was practising before. That is, a king may remain a king and a carpenter may continue one’s carpentering. There is no law or rule which may be laid down as to the kind of work an illuminate may perform or abstain from performing. #RandolphHarris 10 of 18
Similarly, the illuminate is not to be judged by one’s practice of or one’s omission to practise asceticism. The secretary who creates a cheerful office that announces her company as friendly and dependable and her boss as up-and-coming, the waitress or the waiter who creates an atmosphere of pleasant dining, the tour guide or hotel receptionist who makes us feel welcome, the social worker whose look of solicitous concern makes the client feel cared for; the salesman who creates the sense of a hot commodity, the bill collector who inspires fear, the funeral parlor director who makes the bereaved feel understood, the minister who creates a sense of protective outreach but even-handed warmth—all of them must confront in some way or another the requirements of emotional labor. Emotional labor does not observe conventional distinctions between types of jobs. By my estimate roughly 33 percent of American workers today have jobs that subject them to substantial demands for emotional labor. Moreover, of all women working, roughly 50 percent have jobs that call for emotional labor. As traditionally more accomplished managers of feeling in private life, women more than men have put emotional labor on the market, and they know more about its personal costs. #RandolphHarris 11 of 18
Any functioning society makes effective use of its members’ emotional labor. We do not think twice about the use of feeling in the theater, or in psychotherapy, or in forms of group life that we admire. It is when we come to speak of the exploitation of those at the lower level of the hierarchy by those at the higher levels in any society that we become morally concerned. In any system, exploitation depends o the actual distribution of many kinds of profits—many, authority, status, honor, well-being. It is not emotional labor itself, therefore, but the underlying system of recompense that raises the question of what the cost of it is. In the primitive World, we might say, the child had been the bearer of the collective immortality, since it was through him or her that the souls of the ancestors reentered the World. This is one reason why many primitives handled their children so gently: the child was actually in the process of giving birth to himself or herself with the help of the ancestral spirit; if one was mean to the child, the spirit might be upset and withdraw from the World. Under the ideology of the patriarchal family, the child becomes the individual successor to his father—actually, then, merely, the son of a father, and is no longer the independent mediator of the spirts from the ancestral World. However, this now the only spiritual lineage in which the on can perpetuate himself in turn. #RandolphHarris 12 of 18
This is why, too, fathers could be despotic with their children: they were merely objects to whom one had oneself given life. Today we are shocked when we read of the ancient Greek who blinded his sons for disobeying him and going off to war—but their lives were literally his personal property, and he had this authority and used it. Considering that science is widely regarded as the highest value in contemporary industrial society, it is very difficult for the average person to believe that what science commands could be wrong or immortal. If the Lord had not told Abraham not to kill his son, Abraham would have done it, like millions of parents who practiced child sacrifice in history. For the believer neither God nor his modern equivalent, Science, can command anything that is wrong. For this reason, the high degree of obedience is not more surprising than that 35 percent of the group refused at some point to obey; in fact this disobedience of more than a third might well be considered more surprising—and encouraging. People remove the awareness of the conflict by renationalization, and the conflict manifests itself only unconsciously in increased stress, neurotic symptoms, or feeling guilty for the wrong reasons. Subjects are in a conflict situation because they are caught between obedience to authority and behavior patterns learned from childhood on: not to harm other people. #RandolphHarris 13 of 18
However, is this really so? Have we learned not to harm other people? That may be what children are told in Sunday school. In the realistic school of life, however, they learn that they must seek their own advantage even if other people are harmed. It seems 65 percent of the subjects could be conditioned to behave cruelly, but a reaction of indignation or horror against this sadistic behavior was clearly present in most of them. Apparently they had little or no feeling of opposition to the cruel acts they were performing. Possibly this is because they enjoyed the suffering of others and felt no remorse when their behavior was sanctioned by authority. Another possibility is that they were such highly alienated or narcissistic people that they were insulted against what went on in other people: or they might be psychopaths, lacking in any kind of mortal reaction. As for those in whom the conflict manifested itself in various symptoms of stress and anxiety, it should be assumed that they are people who do not has a sadistic or destructive character. (If one had undertaken and even could have made an educated guess as to how people would behave.) However, we cannot forget in more people the presence of conscience, and their pain when obedience made them act against their conscience. #RandolphHarris 14 of 18
Thus, while it may seem there is proof of the easy dehumanization of beings, the subjects’ reactions show rather the contrary—the presence of intense forces within them that find cruel behavior intolerable. We have to consider not only cruel behavior but the—often unconscious—guilty conscience of those who obey authority. (The Nazis had to use an elaborate system of camouflage of atrocities in order to cope with the conscience of the average being.) Another attitude in the striving for power is that of never giving in. Agreeing with an opinion or accepting advice, even if they are considered right, is felt as a weakness, and the mere idea of doing so provokes rebellion. Persons for whom this attitude is important are inclined to lean over backward and, out of sheer fear of giving in, compulsively take the opposition stand. The most general expression of this attitude is the neurotic’s secrete insistence that the World should adapt itself to one instead of adapting oneself to the World. One of the basic difficulties in psychoanalytic therapy comes from this source. The ultimate reason for a patient’s analysis is not the gaining of knowledge or insight, but the use of this insight in order to change one’s attitudes. In spite of recognizing that a change would be for one’s own good, a neurotic of this type abhors this prospect of changing because in implies for one a final giving in. #RandolphHarris 15 of 18
The incapacity to do his has implications also for love relationship. Love, whatever else it may mean, always implies surrender, giving in to the lover as well as to one’s own feelings. The more a person, whether man or woman, is incapable of such giving in, the more unsatisfactory will be one’s love relationships. This same factor may have a bearing also on frigidity, inasmuch as having a climax presupposes just this capacity of completely letting go. The influence which we have seen that the striving for power has on love relations allows us to understand more completely many of the implications of the neurotic need for affection. Many of he attitudes involved in the striving for affection cannot be wholly understood without considering the part that is play in them by the striving for power. It is impossible to present the basic conflict by simply showing it in operation in a number of individuals. Because of its disruptive power the neurotic builds a defensive structure around it which serves not only to bolt it from view but so deeply imbeds it that it cannot be isolated in pure form. The result is that what appears on the surface is more the various attempts at solution than the conflict itself. A simple detailing of case histories, therefore, would not bring all its implications and nuances to full relief; the presentation would necessarily be too circumstantial and give too untransparent a picture. #RandolphHarris 16 of 18
When we look at the complaint type of personality, it manifests all the traits that go with moving toward people. One shows marked need for affection and approval and an especial need for a partner—that is, a friend, lover, husband or wife who is to fulfill all expectations of life and take responsibility for good an evil, one’s successful manipulation becoming the predominant task. These needs have the characteristics common to all neurotic trends; that is, they are compulsive, indiscriminate, and generate anxiety or despondence when frustrated. They operate almost independently of the intrinsic worth of the others in question, as well as of the person’s real feelings toward them. However, these needs may vary in their expression, they all center around a desire for human intimacy, a desire for belonging. Because of the indiscriminate nature of one’s needs, the complaint type will be prone to overrate one’s congeniality and the interests one has in common wit those around one and disregard the separating factors. One’s misjudging of people this way is not due to ignorance, stupidity, or the inability to observe, but is determined by one’s compulsive needs. One feels-as illustrated by a patient’s drawing—like a baby surrounded by strange and threatening animals. #RandolphHarris 17 of 18
There she stood, tiny and helpless, in the middle of the picture, around her a huge bee ready to sting her, a dog that could bite her, a cat that could jump at her, a bull that could gore her. Obviously, then, the real nature of other beings does not matter, expect in so far as the more aggressive ones, beings the more frightening, are the ones whose affection is the most necessary. In sum, this type needs to be liked, wanted, desired, loved; to feel accepted, welcomed, approved of, appreciated; to be needed, to be of importance to others, especially to one particular person; to be helped, protected, taken care of, guided. When in the course of analysis the compulsive character of these needs is pointed out to be a patient, one will be likely to assert that all these desires are quite natural. And, of course, here one is on defensible ground. Except for persons whose whole being has become so warped by sadistic trends that the desire for affection is choked beyond all possibility of functioning, it is safe to assume that everyone dos not to feel liked, to belong, to be helped, and so on. Where the patient errs is in claiming that all one’s frantic beating about for affection and approval is genuine, while in reality the genuine portion is heavily overshadowed by one’s insatiable urge to feel safe. Only when a being finds out one’s correct relation to the Universe and to one’s fellow creatures will one find one’s own well-being. #RandolphHarris 18 of 18
The Challenges You Face in Your Own Life Experience Will be Trying, to Say the Least, for it Has a Glory and Naught Else Can Share it!
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Is Life Only a Stream of Random Events Following One Another Haphazardly? Or is there an Order, a Meaning, a Purpose Behind it All?
You do not know the meaning of philosophical insight, or spiritual engagement, or true growth. People struggle to instill in their children some private sense of honor or dignity which will help the child survive. This means, of course, that they must struggle, stolidly, incessantly, to keep this sense alive in themselves, in spite of the insults, the indifferences, and the cruelty they are certain to encounter in their working day. They patiently browbeat the landlord into fixing the heat, the plaster, the plumbing; this demands prodigious patients; nor is patience usually enough. In trying to make their hovels habitable, they are perpetually throwing good money after bad. Such frustration, so long endured, is driving many strong, admirable men and woman whose only crimes is their culture or lack of affluence to the very gate of paranoia. One remembers them from another time—playing handball in the playground, going to church, wondering if they were going to be promoted at school. One remembers their wedding day. And one sees where the girl is now—vainly looking for salvation from some other embittered, trussed, and struggling boy—and sees the all-but-abandoned children in the streets. A ghetto can be improved in one way only: out of existence. #RandolphHarris 1 of 17
Ignoring the less fortunate or making fun of them is no one to justify one’s own crimes. This perpetual justification empties the heart of all human feeling. The emptier our hearts become, the greater will be our crimes. The country will not change until it re-examines itself and discovers what it really means by freedom. In the meantime, generations keep being born, bitterness is increased by incompetence, pride, and folly, and the World shrinks around us. It is a terrible, an inexorable, law that one cannot deny the humanity of another without diminishing one’s own: in the face of one’s victim, one sees oneself. Walk through the streets of America and see what we, this nation, have becomes. You can see that the whole force of social sanction would fall behind the king to protect one’s definitions of social custom and his ritual prerogatives; otherwise the tribe would lose well-being and life. We might say that the safeguarding of custom imposes tyranny because of the need for the king or queen’s power. The more successful a king or queen, the more prerogatives one could enjoy: one was judged by results. If the harvest (or economy) were good the people were prepared to put up with a moderate amount of tyranny. Protection of custom and criminal jurisdiction go together so naturally, then, that we should not wonder that ritual centralization also came to mean control of the power to punish. #RandolphHarris 2 of 17
Another large step in the evolution of inequality seems to me to be summed up here. To us a police force is part of life, as inevitable, it seems, as death and taxes; we rely on the police to punish those who hurt us. However, it has not always been so. In simple egalitarian societies there is no police force, no way to settle a wrong except to do so yourself, family against family. However, if there is no police force to enforce the law, there is also none to coerce you for any reason. You have to stay alert, but you are also freer. A police force is usually drawn up temporarily for special occasions and then disbanded. However, the result, alas, is not as innocent as it must have seemed to people living during these transitions. What they were doing was bartering away social equality and a measure of personal independence for prosperity and order. There was now noting to stop the state from taking more and more functions and prerogatives into itself, from developing a class of special begins at the center and inferior ones around it, or from beginning to give these special beings a larger share of the good things of the Earth. What we see is that private interests became more and more separated from public interests—until today we hardly know what is public interest. #RandolphHarris 3 of 17
Students who look for the point at which economic activity and social morality begin to pull apart usually focus on the potlatch: it was evidently around the process of redistribution that gift giving gradually changed into grabbing and keeping. As the power figures got more and more ascendancy vis-à-vis the group, y could take a fixed portion of the surplus with the involvement of the people. And this is what we are seeing in California, a state that boasts about have a $21 billion budget surplus, but also has the highest taxes, an affordable housing crisis, and a huge homeless population. The classic potlatch was a redistribution ceremonial pure and simple. The object was to humiliate rivals, to stand out as tall as possible as a big person, a hero. At the same time, the grander was the expiation before the community and the gods to whom the goods were offered. Both the individual urge to maximum self-feeling and the community well-being were served. The chiefs became the principal takers and destroyers of goods. In this was a feudal structure could naturally develop. Another suggestive way of looking at this development is to see it as a shift of the balance of power, away from a dependence on the invisible World of the gods to a flaunting of the visible World of things. #RandolphHarris 4 of 17
Again, it is only natural that once the god became visible in the person of the king or queen, one’s powers became those of this World—visible, temporal powers in the place of invisible, eternal ones. One would come to measure one’s power by the piles of things one actually possessed, by the glory of one’s person, and not, as before, by the efficiency of the ritual technics for the renewal of nature. Keep in mind that it is entirely for the seeker to set one’s own rate of progress. Even the being who is interested only in theoretical discussion thereby, and to that extent, promotes one’s own good. If through inclination or circumstances one prefers to let one’s aspirations remain only at the level of reading and discussion, that at lest is better than being entirely uninterested in them. It will be for one to decide whether to endeavour to obtain the fullest realization of one’s aspirations in practical life. There is room for both classes on this Quest. One should not be discouraged because others have gone ahead on the path more quickly than one, any more than one should be gratified because some have gone ahead more slowly than one, for the fact is that the goal one seeks is already within one’s grasp. One is the Overself that one seeks to unite with, and the time it seems to take to realize this is itself an illusion of the mind. #RandolphHarris 5 of 17
Let one, therefore, go forward at one’s own rate and within the limits of one’s own strength, leaving the result in the hands of God. If one imposes on themselves an impossible ideal, an unattainable standard, they must expect the sense of frustration that will overtake them later. It is better an aspirant should know one’s limitations now than that, filing to do so, one should know tragic disappointments and unutterable despair later. It is better in such a case that one should realize that one is engaged on a long search whose end one cannot reach in this incarnation. How can the naïve inexperienced beginner fail to commit errors and neglect precautions; how can one not be deceived by one’s own imaginations or puzzled by the contradictions and paradoxes which best this path? The newly awakened aspirant should search for clues without losing one’s balance or overreaching new enthusiasm. Of what use is it to reproach oneself again and again for being what one is? How could one have been otherwise, given one’s heredity, environment and history? If I complain I have no will of my own, that people are influencing me in subtle and mysterious ways, you will accuse me of being paranoid and direct me to a psychotherapist. #RandolphHarris 6 of 17
If I put on a white laboratory coat, and assert that you have no will f your own, that your action and experience can be manipulated, predicted, and controlled, then I am recognized as a scientific psychologist, and honored. This is most peculiar. A revolution is going on in psychology. A different image of humans is being tried as a guide to research, theory, and application. Over years, theorists have conceptualized humans as machines; as an organism comparable to rates, pigeons, and monkeys; as a communication system; as an hydraulic system; as a servo-mechanism; as a computer—in short, one has been viewed by psychologist as an analogue of everything but what one is: a person. Humans are, indeed, like all those things; but first of all they are a free, intentional subject. The consumers of psychological writing tended to take our models too seriously and actually started to treat people as if they were the modes that theorists used only as tentative guides to inquiry. However, no, psychologist are using their experience of themselves as persons as a guide to exploring and understanding the experience of others. This is not the death of “objective,” scientific psychology. Rather, it may prove to be the birth of a scientifically informed psychology of human persons—a humanistic psychology. #RandolphHarris 7 of 17
Humanistic psychology is a goal, not a doctrine. It owns its renaissance to the growing conviction that current and past approaches to the study of humans have reached their limits in elucidating human’s behavior and their “essence.” It is a growing corpus of knowledge relating to the questions, “What is a human being, and what might humans become?” Thus, humanistic psychology can be regarded in analogy with industrial psychology or the psychology of mental health or of advertising. These specialties are systems of knowledge bearing on particular families of questions: for instance, what variables affect morale, or the output of the workers, or the maintenance of wellness, or the purchasing behavior of potential customers. Humanistic psychology asks, “What are the possibilities of humans? And from among these possibilities, what is optimum human, and what conditions most probably account for one’s attainment and maintenance of these optima? If psychologist aim to predict and control human behavior and experience, as in their textbooks they claim, they are assigning humans to the same ontological status as weather, stars, minerals, or lower forms of animal life. We do not question anyone’s right to seek understanding in order to better control one’s physical environment and adapt it to one’s purposes. #RandolphHarris 8 of 17
We properly challenge any human’s right to control the behavior and experience of one’s fellows. To the extent that psychologist illumine human existence to bring it under the deliberate control of someone other than the person one’s self, to that extent they are helping to undermine some person’s freedom in order to enlarge the freedom of someone else. If psychologist reveal knowledge of “determiners” of human conduct to people other than the ones from who they obtained this understanding, and if they conceal this knowledge from its source, the volunteer subjects (who have offered themselves up to the scientist’s “Look”), they put the recipients of the knowledge in a privileged position. They grant them an opportunity to manipulate beings without their knowledge or consent. Thus, advertisers, business people, military leaders, politicians, the new media al seek to learn more about the determiners of human conduct, in order to gain power and advantage. If they can sway human behavior by manipulating the conditions which mediate it, they can get large numbers of people to forfeit their own interests and serve the interests of the manipulator. Only if the ones being manipulated are kept mystified as to what is going on, and if their experience of their own freedom is blunted, such secret manipulation of the masses or of an individual by some other person is possible. #RandolphHarris 9 of 17
Psychologist face a choice. We may elect to continue to treat our people as objects of a study for the benefit of some elite; or we may choose to learn about determiners of the human conditions in order to discover ways to overcome or subvert them, so as to enlarge the person—that is, everyone’s—freedom. If we opt for the latter, our path is clear. Our ways of conducting psychological research will have to be altered. Our definition of the purpose of psychology will have to change. And our ways of reporting our findings, as well as the audiences to whom the reports are directed, will have to change. We shall have to state openly whether we are psychologists-for-institutions or psychologists-for-person. The trouble with scientific psychologists is that many have, in a sense, been “bought” by the court, the media, and businesses to represent their agenda. We have in our hands the incredible power to discover conditions for behavior or for ways of being in the World. We have catalogued of the factors which have a determining effect on human behavior and on our condition. We know that, in every experiment that we analyze, there is always an error term, “residual variance”; and we seek to exhaust this residual variance to the best of our ability. We get better at it as we learn how to identify and measure more and more relevant variables. The trouble is, as I see it, that if we exhaust all the variance, the subjects of our study will be not a being, a human person, but rather a robot. #RandolphHarris 10 of 17
Scientific psychology has actually sought means of artificially reducing variance—humanness—among beings, so that they will be more manipulable. Our commendable efforts (from technical viewpoint) in the fields of human engineering, teaching methods, motivation research (in advertising), and salesmanship have permitted practitioners in those realms to develop stereotyped methods that work at controlling outcomes—outcomes that are good for business or political, but necessarily good for the victim. We have taught people how to shape humans into a way of being that makes them useful. We have forgotten that an image of humans as useful grows out of a more fundamental image of humans as the being who can assume many modes of being, when it is of importance to one to do so. I think that a scientific psychologist committed to the aims of humanistic psychology would utilize one’s talents for a different purpose. For example, if individuality and full flowering growth as a person were values, one would seek means of maximizing or increasing the odds for maximization of these ways of being. An example of the biased use of scientific know-how is brainwashing. The brainwasher, through scientific means, seeks to insure that the prisoner will behave and believe as one’s captors wish. #RandolphHarris 11 of 17
The same psychologist who invented the means of brainwashing know how to prevent it from happening. The latter class of knowledge is more in keeping with the aims of humanistic psychology and should be more avidly sought and then applied in more realms than presently is the case, if the humanistic psychology is to be furthered. Learning about human nature is to create change in our lives. Since the beginnings of recorded history, we have been enslaved over gold and other resources. Psychology is supposed to defile the intentions of this desire to enslave. We must learn to gain the power to move through Worlds to create change within this realm of illusory limits. To make things simple and easy. The mental stress of this plane of existence can cause madness as one observes the chaos within the collective consciousness and the effects that it has upon the collective corporeal life experience. This realm can be an accumulation of negative and useless mental garbage which is an abomination to the potential of human mental faculties and the inherent potential of the mind. How odd it seems that psychology has learned more about humans at their worst than at their best. How sad it seems that psychology has employed its powers of truth-finding to serve ignoble masters. I would like to propose that we do not wait until the scarcity of “full-functioning beings” becomes a national emergency. #RandolphHarris 12 of 17
Rather, I would propose that we psychologist reconcile our aims and commitment to truth and our adherence to the canons of scientific inquiry with our human concerns that beings be free, that they grow. I propose that we commence an all-out program of investigation on many fronts to seek answers to the questions humanistic psychology is posing. For example, we need psychologist with the most informed imaginations and talent for ingenious experimentation to wrestle with such questions as, “What are the outer limits of human potential for transcending biological pressures, social pressures, and the impact on a person of one’s past conditioning?”; “What developmental and interpersonal and situational conditions conduce to courage, creativity, transcendent behavior, love, laughter, commitment to truth, beauty, justice, and virtue?” These questions themselves, and even my proposal that we address them, once struck me as less than manly, as tender-hearted and sentimental. I would never have dared pose them to mist of my mentors during my undergraduate and graduate-student says. We are supposed to be tough and disciplined, which meant that we were only to study questions about some very limited class of behavior, not questions about the larger human concerns. “Leave those to the philosophers, minister, and politicians,” we are told. #RandolphHarris 13 of 17
Questions about the image of humans smacked too much of philosophy and were not our proper concern. Actually, our teacher intended only that we learn the tools of our trade, not that we stifle our humanistic concerns; but they produced that outcome anyway. I am making a plea for the powers of rigorous inquiry to be devoted to questions, answers to which will inform a growing, more viable image of beings as human being with potentiality, not solely biological or socially determined being. Through being exposed to the mental chaos over time, one will begin to adjust to the torment of one’s experiences through personal evolution. One will develop severe empathy and will begin to perceive all of the mental weakness of those around them and all the emotional turmoil that comes alone with it. This will enable one to perceive it within one’s self in order to begin ridding oneself of it. If one can remain centered in self, one can transmute this weakness into power. It is at this point that one can utilize strength of mind and will to begin to harness and control this infernal landscape and all infernal powers which dwell within it by becoming one with it. This is the only way to be liberated from it. To ground this power within one should apply methods of personal mental control. #RandolphHarris 14 of 17
When researchers are transparently pledged to further the freedom and self-actualizing of their subjects, rather than be unwitting servants of the leaders of institutions, then they will deserve to be and to be seen as recipients of the secrets of human being and possibility. I can envision a time when psychologist will be the guardians of the most intimate secrets of human possibilities and experience and possessors of knowledge as to how beings can create one’s destiny because beings have showed one; and I hope that if we “sell” these secrete to advertisers, business people, politicians, mass educators, and the military, we shall not do so until after we have informed our subjects, after we have tried to “turn them on,” to enlarge their awareness of being misled and manipulate. I hope, in short, that we turn out to be servants and guardians of individual freedom, growth, and fulfillment, and not spies for the institutions that pay our salaries and research costs in order to get a privileged peep at human grist. Indeed, we may have to function for a time as counterspies, or double spies—giving reports about our subjects to our colleagues and to institutions, and giving reports back to our subjects as to the ways in which institutions seek to control and predict their behavior for their (the institutions’) ends. #RandolphHarris 15 of 17
You will begin to notice how the power of speech is indeed abused and taken for granted. You will start to perceive the vibrations of words mold the very reality which surrounds others. Our words have power and are an expression of true will and divine potential. However, words today are wasted and the power of them is therefore minimized. This minimizes our collective power as a race. Newspapers are written at a sixth grade level so that the subtle nuances and intricacies of communication cannot be learned. Slang and useless words with no meaning are prevalent. This negative energy is accumulated and manifestation of the energy of those unless words happens very fast. One must strive to become peaceful and expand beyond the voice of chaos through silence. You will adjust to the burden. At this point you can generate internal power through silence and attempt to speak order into this World and compel the infernal power which dwell here. With practice, one will become successful. As a result, your words within the physical plane will gain much more power. To ground this power, listen your conscience as it guides you in methods of harnessing the vibrations of the words of others to fuel your own power of creation. Work toward respecting the power of speech. #RandolphHarris 16 of 17
Respect speech as your power and speak with purpose. Invest your energy with word instead of spending it on find solace in silence. Much energy is wasted every day by the masses by investing energy into things that do not serve them. Adults spend hours a day playing video games and watching television. We get into useless power struggles for the sake of meaningless dominative purpose with powerless people. Do not become programmed to harm others, nor lie, cheat and steal through consumerism, jealousy and imposed attachments to things. That is the way to the realm of torment and slavery which seeps into the physical plane drip by drip by drip grounding us as a whole to a lower consciousness, which results in the stifling of our evolution and ascent and limits our awareness. “And they did humble themselves even in the depths of humility; and they did cry mightily to God; yea, even all the day long did they cry unto their God that he would deliver them out of their affliction,” reports Mosiah 21.13. The originality and individuality which are proofs of the prophet’s creativity will define themselves by one’s differences from other seers, even though some have drawn from one and the same MIND. These differences are inevitable and must appear. No two humans are completely alike. And having a beautiful home makes life much more enjoyable, it also helps children perform better at school and makes adults perform better at work. #RandolphHarris 17 of 17
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It Will Not be Enough to Show them the Path—One Must Also Keep them Steadfast on the Path!
Now let me take up the point again. Do not be destroyed in the first years. It happens with too many. There is so much danger all around you. It is easy to despair. It is easy to succumb to bitter hatred of yourself. It is easy to feel that the World no longer belongs to you, when nothing is further from the truth. It is all yours and the passage of the years is yours. And now you must simply and plainly live up to it. When people regard others as unfriendly, the comparisons they implicitly make are with the community of Bethnal Green. We have already discussed the reasons why people living in the borough considered that a friendly place. They and their relatives had lived there a long time, and consequently had around them a host of long-standing friends and acquaintances. At Greenleigh they neither share long residence with their fellow tenants nor as a rule have kin to serves as bridges between the family and the wider community. These two vital interlocked conditions of friendliness are missing, and their absence goes far to explain the attitude we have illustrated here. It also accounts for the astringency of the criticism. Migrants, to the Untied States of America or to housing estates, always take part of their homeland, with them, our information like everyone else. They take with them the standards of Bethnal Green, derived from a close community of kindred and neighbors. #RandolphHarris 1 of 16
Friends, within and without the kindship network, were the unavoidable accompaniment of the kind of life they led—too much so for devotees of quiet and privacy. They grew up with their friend, they met them at auntie’s, for tens years for tea and animal crackers or hot chocolate, they walked down the street with them to work. They are used to friendliness, and, their standards in this regard being so high, they are all the more censorious about the other tenants of the County Council. They are harsh in their comment, where someone arriving from a less settled district, or from another and even newer housing estate, might be accustomed to the standoffishness, and, by one’s canons, even impressed by the good behavior, of the same neighbors. If they had an established community, it would not matter quite so much people being newcomers. The place would then already have been crisscrossed with tires of kinship and friendship, and one friend made would have been an introduction to several. However, Greenleigh was built in the late 1940s on ground that had been open fields before. The nearest substantial settlement, a few miles away at Barnhurst, is the antithesis of East London, an outer suburb of privately-owned houses, mainly built between the wars for the rising middle classes of the time. #RandolphHarris 2 of 16
The distance between the estate and its neighbor is magnified by the resentment, real and imagined, of the old residents of Barnhurst at the intrusion of rough East Enders into the rides of Essex and, what is worse, living in houses not very unlike their own put up at the expense of the taxpayer. “People at Barnhurst look down on us. They treat us like dirt. They are a different class of people. They have money.” “It is not so easy for the girls to get boys down here. If people from the estate go to the dance hall at Barnhurst they all look down on them. There is a lot of class distinction down here.” These, the kind of thoughts harbored by the ex-Bethnal Greeners, do nothing to make for ease of communication between the two places. So there is no tradition into which the newcomers can enter. If Barnhurst has any influence upon Greenleigh, it is to sharpen the resentment of the estate against its environment and to stimulate the aspiration for material standards as high. Nor would it matter quite so much if the residents of Greenleigh all had the same origin. No doubt if they all came from Bethnal Green, they would get on much better than they do: many of them would have known each other before and, anyway, at least have a background in common. As it is, they arrive from all over London, though with East Ender predominant. Such a vast common origin might be enough to bind together a group of Cockneys in the Western Desert Western Essex is to near for that. #RandolphHarris 3 of 16
When all are from London, no one is from London: they are from one of the many districts into which the city is divided. What is then emphasized is far more their differences than their sameness. The native of Bethnal Greens feels oneself different from the native of Stepney or Hackney. One of our informants, who had recently moved into Bethnal Green from Hackney, a few minutes away, told us “I honestly do not like telling people that I live in Bethnal Green. I come from Hackney myself, and when I was a child living in Hackney, my parents would not let me come to Bethnal Green. I thought it was something terrible.” These distinctions are carried over to Greenleigh, where it is no virtue in a neighbor to have come from Stepney, rather the opposite. Mr. Abbot summed it up as follows: “You have not grown up with them. They come from different neighborhoods, they are different sorts of people and they do not mix.” We had expected that, despite these disadvantages, people would, in the course of time, settle down and make new friendships, and our surprise was that this had not happened to a greater extent. The informants who had been on the estate longest had no higher opinion than others of the friendliness of their fellows. Four of the 18 coupes who had been there six or seven years judged other people to be friendly, as did six of the 23 couples with residence for five years or less. #RandolphHarris 4 of 16
Mr. Oliver was one who commented on how long it was taking time for its wonders to perform. “They are all Londoners here but they get highbrow when they get here. They are not so friendly. Coming from a tuning like the one where we lived, we knew everyone. We were bred and born amongst them, like one big family we were. We knew all their troubles and everything. Here they are all total strangers to each other and so they are all wary of each other. It is question of time, I suppose. However, we have been here four years and I do not see any change yet. It does seem to be taking a very long while to get friendly.” One reason it is taking so long is that the estate is so strung out—the number of people per acre at Greenleigh being only one-fifth what it is in Bethnal Green—and low density does not encourage sociability. In Bethnal Green your pub, and your shop is a “local.” There people meet their neighbors. At Greenleigh they are put off by distance. They do go to the pub because it may take 20 minutes to walk, instead of one minute as in Bethnal Green. They do not go to the shops, which are grouped into specialized centers instead of being scattered in converted houses through the ordinary streets, more than they have to, again because of the distance. And they do not go so much to either because when they get there, the people are gathered from the corners of the estate, instead of being neighbors with whom they already have a point of contact. #RandolphHarris 5 of 16
The pubs and shops of Bethnal Green serve so well as “neighborhood centers” because there are so many of them: they provide the same small face-to-face groups with continual opportunities to meet. Where they are few and large, as at Greenleigh, they do not serve this purpose so well. The relatives of Bethnal Green have not, therefore, been replaced by the neighbors of Greenleigh. The newcomers are surrounded by strangers instead of kin. Their lives outside the family are no longer centered on the people; their lives are centered on the house. This change from a people-centered to a house-centered existence is one of the fundamental changes resulting from the migration. It does some way to explain the competition for status which is in itself the result of isolation from kin and the cause of estrangement from neighbors, the reason why coexistence, instead of being just a state of neutrality—a tacit agreement to live and let live—is frequently infused with so much bitterness. When we asked what in their view had made people change since they moved from East London, time and time again our informants gave the same kind of suggestive answers—that people had become, as they put it, “toffeensed,” “big-headed,” “high and mighty,” “jealous,” “a cut above everybody else.” #RandolphHarris 6 of 16
“It is like a strange land in your own country,” said Mrs. Ames. “People are jealous out here. They are made to be much quitter in a high-class way, if you know what I mean. They get snobbish, and when you get snobbish you are not sociable any more.” “I am surprised,” said Mr. Tonks, “at the way people vote Conservative at Greenleigh when the L.C.C. built these houses for them. One has a little car or something and so one thinks oneself superior. People seem to think only of themselves when they get here.” “The neighbor runs away with the idea that she is a cut above everybody else, but when you get down to brass tacks,” which Mrs. Berry proceeded to do, “she is worse off than you will ever be. She is one of those people, you know what I mean, she is very toffee-nosed. There are some people down here who get like that.” Conflict play an infinitely greater roe in neurosis than is commonly assumed. To detect them, however, is no easy matter—partly because they are essentially unconscious, but even more because the neurotic goes to any length to deny their existence. What, then, are the signals that would warrant us to suspect underlying conflicts? We usually can find their presence was indicated by a few factors, both fairly obvious. One is the resulting symptoms—fatigue, boredom, jealousy, and stealing. #RandolphHarris 7 of 16
The fact is that every neurotic symptom points to an underlying conflict; that is, every symptom is more or less direct outgrowth of a conflict. We shall see gradually what unresolved conflicts do to people, how they produce states of anxiety, depression, indecision, inertia, detachment, and so on. An understanding of the causative relation here helps direct our attention from the manifest disturbances to their source—though the exact nature of the source will not be disclosed. The other signal indicating that conflicts were in operation was inconsistency. When person is convinced of a procedure being wrong and a injustice being done to him or her, or when a person who has highly valued friendship is turned to stealing money from a friend, sometimes the person will be aware of such inconsistencies; more often one is blind to them even when they are blatantly obvious to an untrained observer. Inconsistences are as definite an indication of the presence of conflicts as a rise in body temperature is of physical disturbance. To cite some common ones: A girls wants above all else to marry, yet shrinks from the advances of any man. A mother oversolicitous of her children frequently forgets their birthdays. A person always generous to others is cheap about expenditures for himself. #RandolphHarris 8 of 16
Another who longs for solitude never manages to be alone. One forgiving and tolerant toward most people is oversevere and demanding with oneself. Unlike the symptoms, the inconsistencies often permit of tentative conflict. An acute depression, for instance, reveals only the fact that a person is caught in a dilemma. However, if an apparently devoted mother forgets her children’s birthdays, we might be inclined to think that the mother was more devoted to her ideal of being a good mother than to the children themselves. We might also admit the possibility that her ideal collided with an unconscious sadistic tendency to frustrate them. Sometimes a conflict will appear on the surface—that is, be consciously experienced as such. This would seem to contradict my assertion that neurotic conflicts are unconscious. However, actually what appears is a distortion or modification of the real conflict. Thus a person may be torn by a conscious conflict when, in spite of one’s evasive techniques, well-functioning otherwise, one finds oneself confronted with the necessity of making a major decision. One cannot decide now whether to marry this woman or that one or whether to marry at all, whether to take this or that job, whether to retain or dissolve a partnership. He will then go through the greatest torment, shutting from one opposite to the other, utterly incapable of arriving at any decision. #RandolphHarris 9 of 16
He may in his distress call upon an analyst, expecting him to clarify the particular issues involved. And one will necessarily be disappointed, because the present conflict is merely the point at which the dynamite of inner frictions finally exploded. The particular problem distressing him now cannot be solved without taking the long and tortuous road of recognizing the conflicts hidden beneath it. In other instances the inner conflict may be externalized and appear in the person’s conscious mind as an incompatibility between oneself and one’s environment. Or, finding that seemingly unfounded fears and inhibitions interfere with his wishes, a person may be aware that the crosscurrents within oneself issue from deeper sources. The more knowledge we gain of a person, the better able we are to recognize the conflicting elements that account for the symptoms, inconsistencies, and surface conflicts—and, we must add, the more confusing becomes the picture, through the number and variety of contradictions. So we are led to ask Can there be a basic conflict underlying all these particular conflicts and originally responsible for all of them? Can one picture the structure of conflict in terms, say, of an incompatible marriage, where an endless variety of apparently unrelated disagreements and rows over friends, children, finances, mealtimes, servants, all point to some fundamental disharmony in the relationship itself? #RandolphHarris 10 of 16
A belief in a basic conflict within the human personality is ancient and plays a prominent role in various religions and philosophies. The powers of light and darkness, of God and the devil, of good and evil are some of the ways in which this belief has been expressed. In modern psychology, Dr. Freud, on this score as on many others has done pioneer work. His first assumption was that the basic conflict is one between our instinctual drives, with their blind urge for satisfaction, and the forbidding environment—family and society. The forbidding environment is internalized at an early age and appears from then on as the forbidding superego. What remains, then, is the contention that the opposition between primitive egocentric drives and our forbidding conscience is the basic source of our manifold conflicts. My belief is that though it is a major conflict, it is a secondary and arises of necessity during the development of a neurosis. If we could actually see that God was satisfied with the fruits of our labor, imagine what a stimulus it would be to our own efforts today. Again we come back to the natural genius of primitive beings, who provided themselves with what beings need most: to know daily that one is living right in the eyes of God, that one’s workaday action has cosmic value—no, even that it enhances God Himself! #RandolphHarris 11 of 16
For early beings emanations of light and heat from the Sun were the archetypes of all miraculous power: the Sun shines from afar and by its invisible touch cases life to unfold and expand. We cannot say much more about this mystery even today. The individual Sun-Being was the focus of a cosmology of invisible energy, like the modern computer and atomic reactor, and one aroused the same hopes and yearning the arouse for the perfectly ordered, plentifully supplied life. Like the reactor, too, one reflected back energy-power on those around one: just the right amount and they prospered; too much and they withered into decay and death. Just as in traditional society, we tend to vote for the person who already represents health, wealth, and success so that some of it will rub off on us. Whence the old adage “Noting succeeds like success.” This attraction is also especially strong in certain religious cults of the Father Divine type: the followers want to see wealthy flaunted in the person of their leader, hoping that some of it will radiate back to them. How can we unite the message of the Spiritual Presence with the experience of the absent God? Let me say something about the absent God, by asking—what is the cause of His absence? We may answer—our resistance, our indifference, our lack of seriousness, our honest or dishonest questioning, our genuine or cynical doubt. #RandolphHarris 12 of 16
All these answers have some truth, but they are not final. The final answer to the question as to who makes God is absent is God Himself! It is the work of the Spirit that removes God from our sight, not only for some beings, but sometimes for many in a particular period. We live in an era in which the God we know is the absent God. However, in knowing God as the absent God, we know Him; we feel His absence as the empty space that is left by something or someone that once belonged to us and has now vanished from our view. God is always infinitely near and infinitely far. We are fully aware of Him only if we experience both of these aspects. However, sometimes, when our awareness of God has become shallow, habitual—not warm and not cold—when He has become too familiar to be exciting, too near to be felt in His infinite distance, then He becomes the absent God. The Spirit has not ceased to be present. The Spiritual Presence can never end. However, the Spirit of God hides God from our sight. No resistance against the Spirit, no indifference, no doubt can drive the Spirit away. However, the Spirit that always remains present to us can hide itself, and this means that it can hide God. Then the Spirit shows us nothing except the absent God, and the empty space within us which is His space. #RandolphHarris 13 of 16
The Spirit has shown to our time and to innumerable people in our time the absent God and the empty space that cries in us to be filled by Him. And then the absent one may return and take the space that belongs to Him, and the Spiritual Presence may break again into our consciousness, awakening to us to recognize what we are, shaking and transforming us. This may happen like the coming of a storm, the storm of the Spirit, stirring up the stagnant air of our Spiritual life. The storm will then recede; a new stagnancy may take place; and the awareness of the present God may be replaced by the awareness of the empty space within us. Life in the Spirit is ebb and flow—and this means—whether we experience the present or the absent God, it is the work of the Spirit. A constitutional fatalism continuously adjusts itself to the ever-changing present. A pervasive alarmism greets every advance. For two thousand years we have been getting “out of hand.” This derives of course from our susceptibility to viewing the “now” ad the End Time, an Apocalyptic obsession that has endured since Christ ascended into Heaven. We must stop this! We must perceive that we are at the dawn of a sublime age! Enemies will no longer be conquered. They will be devoured, and transformed. #RandolphHarris 14 of 16
However, here is the point I really want to make: Modernism and Materialism—elements that the Church has feared for so long—are in their philosophical and practical infancy! Their sacramental nature is only just being revealed! Never mind the infantile blunders! The electronic revolution has transmuted the industrial World beyond all predictive thinking of the twenty first century. We are still having birth pangs. Get into it! Work with it! Play it out. Daily life for millions in the developed countries is not only comfortable but a compilation of wonders that borders on the miraculous. And so new spiritual desires arise which are infinitely more courageous than the missionary goals of the past. There will be mountains and obstacles in your life to overcome and this will breed achievement. There will be beasts in our field of existence so that you may grow in cunning and might. This breeds victory. You must stand alone and endure as a warrior and usurp the power. Do not focus so much on politics and the news, as this keeps us from focusing on the power we have within. The power to destroy and create anew. It keeps us from seeing that we are our own God and we are our own Devil. We must constantly work toward achieving our goals through creating doorways of manifestation of desire through action in the World. #RandolphHarris 15 of 16
Thee for Enlivening All the Cheerful Eyes that Glance so Brightly at the New Sun-Rise!
You Have Made Me Suffer or Have Damaged Me, and therefore You are Obliged to Help Me, Take Care of Me, or Support Me!
The Miracles of Genius Breed Doubt as Well as Faith so that We Feel Uplifted from the World!
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An Ideal Helps to Hold a Being Back from One’s Weaknesses, a Standard Gives One Indirectly a Kind of Support, as Well as, Directly, Guidance!
Randolph Harris II International Institute 